Inferno
Carmen Firan
translated from the Romanian by Dorin Motz
cover art by Daniela Codarcea Kamiliotis
ISBN 978-0-923389-85-7 $10.00 US 74 pages
Spuyten Duyvil Novella Series
The classic love-triangle, Husband-Wife-Mistress, is masterfully built, decoded, and deconstructed in Carmen Firan’s writing. This story, divided in 3 parts, gives each character the chance to have his/her own say to gain the reader’s side. There are no winners in this story and nobody is defeated. Love, alone, is floating above the ruins laden with loss yet ready for what’s about to happen.
In sculpted, often striking prose, Firan catches the sad poetry of our everyday disappointments and turns the boredom and alienation of some banal lives into a gentle, universal music. This cruel, gentle and human tale is cool, brittle, yet touching and soulful. Anyone should be able to relate deeply to it.
Bruce Benderson
Blending the subtlety of a poet, the passion of the novelist and the dramatic sense of the playwright, Carmen Firan’s beautiful and powerful story, charged with gloom and passion, recreate the struggles with life and love. As readers we can only praise the inspired author for recreating “the farce of living” with such authenticity and talent.
Harry Mathews
The world of her story is filled with the pathos of people caught by uniquely contemporary dilemmas. This is a story of loss and love … A chill of strange magic is always in the air.
Andrei Codrescu
Carmen Firan (born 29 November 1958, Craiova) is a Romanian poet, novelist, short story writer, journalist, and playwright, resident in New York.
She has published fifteen books of poetry, novels, essays and short stories. Her writings appear in translation in many literary magazines and in various anthologies in France, Israel, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Canada, U K, and the U.S. Her recent books and publications in the United States of America include: Rock and Dew (Sheep Meadow Press), Words and Flesh (Talisman Publishers), The Second Life (Columbia University Press), The Farce (Spuyten Duyvil Press), In The Most Beautiful Life (Umbrage Editions), and The First Moment After Death (Writers Club Press).
She is a member of PEN American Center and the Poetry Society of America and serves on the editorial boards of the international magazines, Lettre Internationale (Paris-Bucharest) and Interpoezia (New York). She is the co-editor of Naming the Nameless (An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry), Stranger at Home, Poetry with an Accent, and Born in Utopia (An Anthology of Romanian Modern and Contemporary Poetry).